RevoU Culture

1 Kindness

We always try to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. Be it our team member, our direct report or our manager.

We act with compassion and think about the consequences of our behavior on the other person, regardless of the hierarchical relationship.

We are empathetic with our colleagues but also, and especially with our most important stakeholder: our students.

We understand how much anxiety comes with starting or changing a career and in particular in looking for a new job. Whenever take this for granted, and try to support our students as much as we cannot only in equipping them with the most effective technical skills but in providing them all the psychological support they need.

Despite being extremely driven and ambitious about our own career, we are leaving your ego at RevoU’s entrance door.

We make time to help our colleagues, even if it doesn’t directly benefit us (or our team). We are lifting everyone around us as we genuinely want them to succeed.

We believe that career progression at RevoU is not a zero-sum game: helping each other will benefit everyone’s career.

We are aware that our drive and selflessness put us at risk of forgetting about our own well-being and we are not afraid to take a step back when necessary, balancing the intensity of our day-to-day work with periods of deserved rest.

2 Candor

We are transparent and authentic with each other across all levels:
●    Horizontally, among team members and across teams
●    Downward, from manager to direct report
●    Upward, from direct report to manager

We are challenging cultural habits of keeping things for ourselves and giving hierarchies too much importance.

We are aware that trying being political will hurt our career rather than helping us, and we only say things about other employees that we would tell them to their face.

We are not afraid of saying what we think, every time we think is in the best interest of the company, even if it’s uncomfortable.
Especially when it’s uncomfortable.

We try to share information as freely aspossible across the organization, as we believe that being open by default benefits everyone’s decision making.

We give hierarchy much lower importance than in other organizations and society at large, and favor depth of thinking, supported by empirical evidence, versus seniority. We expect our best junior employees to be able to challenge our senior management often.

We don’t expect everyone to agree all the time with everyone. Decisions need to be taken though, and when in disagreement, we don’t fear expressing our disagreement while wholeheartedly committing to it. Executing at the best of our capabilities for the best interest of the company

3 Highest Standards

"Around here we try to be proud of every little piece of work we do"
-Walt Disney

Most great companies expect high standards and excellence when it comes to the end product or services offered to their customers. Some others push the concept further by expecting to delight with every customer-facing interaction.

At RevoU, we hold ourselves to the highest standards -taking the concept of high standards outwards to our customers, and inwards to everything we do every day.

Upholding the highest standards allows us to grow at all times. To become a better version of ourselves and make people around us better as well. It makes sure we deliver the highest quality experiences for our students to guide them through their life-changing journey with us. Therefore, we expect everyone to develop and maintain a culture of high standards.
First and foremost with regards to your own personal work.
Then to the work of your team members.
Finally to the work of your peers and anyone you interact with in the company.

As we develop the highest standards for our own work, we also expect it also from our peers, our direct reports and everyone we interact with.

There are few things more rewarding than to perform at our peak with other exceptional performers around us towards a common goal and vision. Once you’ve tasted high standards, there is no going back.

“A culture of high standards is protective of all the “invisible” but crucial work that goes on in every company. I’m talking about the work that no one sees. The work that gets done when no one is watching. In a high standards culture, doing that work well is its own reward – it’s part of what it means to be a professional.”
-Jeff Bezos

“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious” -A. Einstein

We are never satisfied with the status quo and any success obtained so far. We strive to always improve and do better.
We fight complacency by being healthily paranoid about the success we achieved so far and are aware of the challenges the future will hold. We know that there is so much more we can do and we always dream bigger. We know we are in a unique position to really make a difference in this world and know that it is a rare privilege to be in that position. We have to give it our best shot - every day.

‘Always a student’ mentality does not only apply to RevoU as a company. It applies to each of us as individuals. We actively manage our personal growth. We embrace curiosity as lifelong learners who believe that the moment we stop learning, we start becoming irrelevant. We are seeking to learn something new everyday, as we try to go to bed every night a bit better than when we woke up.

It doesn’t matter how smart we are today. For what we want to achieve, we need to continue growing ourselves just as fast as RevoU.

We believe that our relentless drive to learn something new every day, combined with our long term thinking, will make us outperform every other company over the long run. We don’t rely just on talent or having the ‘smartest’ people. We have the grit and dedication to show up every day and do what’s necessary to rise up to the challenge of today - of Day 1.

Our culture of high standards starts with our approach to hiring:

“At Google, we front-load our people investment. This means the majority of our time and money spent on people is invested in attracting, assessing, and cultivating new hires. We spend more than twice as much on recruiting, as a percentage of our people budget, as an average company. If we are better able to select up front, that means we have less work to do with them once they are hired” - Laszlo Bock, (former) VP of People Operations at Google

We believe that finding, recruiting, and developing top talent is the single most important factor that will determine our success in the years to come.

It doesn’t matter how junior or ‘simple’ a job is, every new hire should raise the average talent bar of a team, function and company at large.

As managers, we are not afraid of hiring people more talented than us, but we instead embrace the opportunity to do so.

We invest more in our hiring process than other companies and make hiring everyone’s responsibility. We are always on the lookout for the next exceptional team member to join our journey.

“Training is the manager’s job. Training is the highest leverage activity a manager cando to increase the output of an organization.”- Andrew S. Grove

Coherently with our “Always a student” mentality, we go the extra mile as a company to invest in the growth of our own employees.
Both directly via specific training, and indirectly by means of our managers.

For the former, we expect our most senior employees (starting with our leadership team), to invest a substantial amount of their time in providing direct training to the organization.

For the latter, we value more than most companies “managerial excellence”. Managers are the primary responsible of the career growth of our employees and as a result of that, they play a pivotal role in our employee performance, retention and overall happiness.
‍
We ask our employees, from our very junior ones all the way to the top, to hold their own managers to the highest standards and to not be afraid of speak up when such standards are not being met.

We make kindness and empathy co-exist with a strong performance driven approach to work. For as much as the depth of care for each other could be often equated to a family type of relationship, we prefer to describe our personal bonds by using the analogy of a professional sports team. Professional athletes that work together as a team for a bigger goal

We want everyone around us to be amazing in their role so as to enable us to push forwards towards our common vision and purpose.

We earn each other respect by being as effective as possible in our role. As individual contributors, managers and leaders.

If caring for each other is a necessary condition to thrive at RevoU, it is not sufficient. Being outstanding at your role is.

We believe every person can be great at something in this world. If someone is not able to be great at RevoU, we believe they should not waste their time failing here, but go on and excel somewhere else where the conditions fit with their potential & aspirations. We have big aspirations and maintain the highest standard in everything we do. We will provide support, guidance, training, and ample opportunity to anyone who we hire. That said, we have low tolerance for areas of low performance and we understand it’s our duty towards the company, each other, and ultimately the students we serve, to sometimes make the difficult but necessary decision to part ways with someone who will not be able to succeed with RevoU and let them find the place where they will.

4 Passion

We believe in the importance and the beauty of passion in work life.

We have a different and much larger approach than most companies when it comes to being “customer centric”. We call it Passion.
‍
We are passionate about life in general and work as a subset of it. We want to do work that matters. Work that has a real, quantifiable impact on the lives of people around us and on society at large.

We see work as a fundamental part of life, not something to separate from it or to “balance” with.

We find it sad to talk to friends who are dreading Sunday evenings. We try to convince them to change jobs, telling them that there must be a better way to spend the majority of your waking hours.

If we ever find ourselves in such a position, we bring it up to our manager to solve the root causes of it as fast as possible. Or part ways to seek more fulfilling work outside of RevoU.

Passion is contagious, as is the lack thereof.

We get excited, we celebrate, we laugh a lot and sometimes we cry. We believe this is the best way to live a professional life to its fullest.

We are the opposite of boring.

But what are we passionate about precisely?

‍Our students, first and foremost.
We do everything we can to make them succeed.
Even if that means doing something that doesn‘t bring any profit to the company in the short term.
And even if it doesn’t bring profit over the longer term.
We believe that doing the right thing for our students should be prioritized over short-term business gains.

We believe that running a profitable business is the best way to maximize the impact we can have on society at large and that building long term trust with our students, by trading off short term commercial gains, is the most strategic way for us to maximize such impact

.…And we are passionate about life at large. Many of us have families & kids to lookafter. Some of us have side projects. With many of us we will split paths and we will support them in starting their own businesses.

Whatever our life focus outside of RevoU, we always try to do it with Passion.